On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

by

Friedrich Nietzsche

(1873)

1

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed
into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever
beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of
"world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn
a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
_One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated
how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human
intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not
exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human
life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly-as
though the world's axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the
gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity,
that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing
so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell
up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as
every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher,
supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused
upon his action and thought.

It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly
allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as
a device for detaining them a minute within existence.For without this addition
they would have every reason to flee this existence as quickly as Lessing's
son. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over
the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence.
For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the
value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even
its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same
deceitful character.

As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its
principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less
robust individuals preserve themselves-since they have been denied the chance
to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts
of prey, This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering,
lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in
borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role
for others and for oneself-in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary
flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost
nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth
could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream
images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms."
Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive
stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things.
Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night of his
life. His moral sentiment does not even make an attempt to prevent this, whereas
there are supposed to be men who have stopped snoring through sheer will power.
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive
himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not
conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body-in order to confine
and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of
the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering
of the fibers! She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which
might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber
of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference
of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as
if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger. Given this situation, where in
the world could the drive for truth have come from?

Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals,
he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation.
But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially
and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly
to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes.
This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first
step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count
as "truth" from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and
binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language
likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth
and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid
designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to
be real. He says, for example, "I am rich," when the proper designation for
his condition would be "poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary
substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover
harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him.
What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is
being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is
basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences
of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man
now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences
of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences;
toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely
inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are
they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations
congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying
himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be
satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not
be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.
What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further
inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result
of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason.
If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and
if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how
could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something
otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We
separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the
plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons
of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches only upon its
ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary
differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that
property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with
words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression;
otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which
is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would
be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language
and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates
the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold
of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into
an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second
metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right
into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man
who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps
such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps
he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear
that he must know what men mean by "sound." It is this way with all of us concerning
language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when
we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but
metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X
of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image,
and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically
in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the
scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never
land, is a least not derived from the essence of things.

In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word
instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve
as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which
it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously
has to fit countless more or less similar cases--which means, purely and simply,
cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises
from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is
never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf"
is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting
the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves,
there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all
the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but
by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy,
and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person "honest," and
then we ask "why has he behaved so honestly today?" Our usual answer is, "on
account of his honesty." Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause
of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called
"honesty"; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal
actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and
which we now designate as "honest" actions. Finally we formulate from them a
qualities occulta which has the name "honesty." We obtain the concept,
as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature
is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but
only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our
contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does
not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim
that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of
course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable
as its opposite.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms:
in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically
intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem
to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which
we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out
and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing
and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we
have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful
means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the
duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner
binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things
stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance
with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness
and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one
is obliged to designate one thing as "red," another as "cold," and a third as
"mute," there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability,
and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from
the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational"
being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He
will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.
First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts,
so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything
which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize
perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.
For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be
achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order
according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges,
subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries-a new world, one which now confronts
that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better
known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the
regulative and imperative world. Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual
and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification, the great
edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and
exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics.
Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even
the concept-which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die-is nevertheless
merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved
in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the
mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual
crap game "truth" means using every die in the designated manner, counting its
spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order
of caste and class rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens
with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby
delimited, as within a templum, so every people has a similarly mathematically
divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth
demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere.
Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds
in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation,
and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such
a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs:
delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown
apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above
the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers
from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which
he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired,
but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When
someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place
and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and
finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth"
within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then,
after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth
to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it
is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which
would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At
bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis
of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous
to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation.
Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's
service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers
the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely
fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely
multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the
measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing
that he hasthese things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him
as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors
and takes them to be the things themselves.

Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose,
security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation
of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human
imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this
sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only
by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does
man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he
could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his"self consciousness" would
be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself
that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one
that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world
is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been
decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception,
which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available. But
in any case it seems to me that "the correct perception"-which would mean "the
adequate expression of an object in the subject"-is a contradictory impossibility.
For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object,
there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most,
an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering
translation into a completely foreign tongue-for which I there is required,
in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance"
is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as
possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical
world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before
his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more
about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship
of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when
the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down
for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for
all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have
if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original
nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same
manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be
reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely
nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.

Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep
mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite early convinced
himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and fallibility of the laws
of nature. He has concluded that so far as we can penetrate here-from the telescopic
heights to the microscopic depths-everything is secure, complete, infinite,
regular, and without any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this
shaft forever, and the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not
contradict each other. How little does this resemble a product of the imagination,
for if it were such, there should be some place where the illusion and reality
can be divined. Against this, the following must be said: if each us had a different
kind of sense perception-if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now
as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as
blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound-then no one would
speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as
a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law
of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only
with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature-which,
in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations
always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their
essence. All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves
bring to them-time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and
number. But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite
astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might
lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within
the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time
and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the
same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all
things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things
we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within
themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing
in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement
of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties
which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In
conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor
formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these
forms and thus occurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of
subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves
can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms That is
to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical
relationships in the domain of metaphor.

2

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction
of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously
constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on
this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always
building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old
cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework
and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic
world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so
that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds
his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on
it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist.
And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break
in upon him, powers which oppose scientific "truth" with completely different
kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is
the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense
with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive
is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and
rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products,
the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and
it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually
confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences,
metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion
the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful,
irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as
the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web
of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely
because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this
web of concepts is torn by art. Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same
dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are
with the things that we see every day. "If a workman were sure to dream for
twelve straight hours every night that he was king," said Pascal, "I believe
that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night
that he was a workman. In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted
that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired
people-the ancient Greeks, for instance- more closely resembles a dream than
it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every
tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag
away maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company
of Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful
team of horses-and this is what the honest Athenian believed- then, as in a
dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around
man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing
themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.

But man has an invincible inclination to allow
himself to be deceived D and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the
rhapsodist tells i him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in
the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive
without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it
is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never
more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative
pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones
of abstractions, so that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving
path which carries man where he would otherwise walk." The intellect has now
thrown the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy
officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual
who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey
for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its
face the expression of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything
that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation, just as that previous conduct
did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this
life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense
framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life
long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the
most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework
to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic
fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating
that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be
guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which
leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions.
There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb,
or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations
of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual
barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful
present intuition.

There are ages in which the rational man and the
intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with
scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.
They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle
needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding
these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which
has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as was perhaps the case
in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively
and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture
can take shape and art's mastery over life can be established. All the manifestations
of such a life will be accompanied by this dissimulation, this disavowal of
indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this immediacy
of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay
jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need. It seems
as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an OIympian cloudlessness,
and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts
and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without
ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he
aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing
in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually
inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption-in addition to obtaining a defense
against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers;
he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from
experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is
then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and
will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experience
and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man,
who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception,
and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece
of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the
other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering
and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical
features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm
cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps
he walks from beneath it